EIT ALUMNI: Liana Shvachiy

EIT HEALTH ALUMNI 

EIT Health Innovators Network

Regional Coordinator of DACH Regions

Liana was born in Ukraine and moved to Portugal when she was ten. Her first encounter with the EIT Community came from her professor at the University of Lisbon, where she was doing her master’s in
Neurosciences. Initially, she joined the PubHD event in Évora, Portugal and from there, in her words, she became a “snowball” rolling through an EIT path of courses, events, and projects. Liana joined several courses after this first event and started to engage more with the community, but it was when she became an Alumni that her role would develop even further. Liana started as a local representative in Lisbon, but she then began her Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences (which is done via a mixed scholarship with Germany) and had to move to Germany. Due to the nature of the organization of EIT Health, which is divided into regions, and then each region is divided by countries or cities she had the opportunity to apply for an open position to be the Coordination of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland within the EIT Health Inonvators community. She was selected for the position and has been the coordinator of these regions since 2020.

Also, at the same time, she engaged in the newly formed EIT Health Ageing Ph.D. School to complement her Ph.D. degree in Biomedical Sciences. Liana notes that although she needs to promote the EIT Community since she is a coordinator, she does it not because of her role as a board member but because she truly believes that the community has great value. In her opinion, EIT supports “not just students, but also big companies and startups” as it brings a lot of learning and skills and, in some cases funding. For Liana, the EIT Community brought a lot of new abilities and knowledge, especially in entrepreneurship and innovation, which is a field that in academia is not so promoted. This is something that is continuously being developed and deepened, for instance, just now there is a new course in the Faculty of Medicine of Lisbon - Innovation and entrepreneurship for medical students and scientists. It is a short one-week course, but it helps to bridge that gap and brings a lot of value to the students of science since it follows the path of an idea, from its creation to its development and later, to the ability to teach and pass that knowledge.

When talking about her progress during these years with EIT Liana points out that this community gave her a skillset she didn’t previously have, for instance: She now can manage people or even projects, can organize events and multitask, but she considers that the most valuable thing that she gained from these experiences was her selfgrowth. Liana says she feels more confident about speaking and communicating with people and networking. Looking back, she sees that in two years her life suffered big changes and that all the potential that was hidden in her is now being exposed and developed.

This journey full of progress and growth isn’t always easy and there are many challenges on the way, but to Liana, it’s exactly these challenges and the way they are overcome that creates the value and family that is EIT Health Innovators Community and now also EIT Community. She is currently representing EIT Health Innovators Community in the EIT Alumni Board, and even though the teams are always changing, the new people are just becoming new members of this big family, since, in the end, we all share a common goal: creating the best opportunities for our  community members.

More about this EIT Health Innovators Community here.